Trump Wants to Talk ‘Affordability,’ But Is Stuck in a Gilded White House Bubble

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

Americans are in a cost-of-living crisis, and in this month’s Democratic landslide elections, they sent President Trump a wake-up call. Utility rates are up 11% since he took office, health care premiums are about to surge for millions — and just as grocery prices were finally stabilizing after pandemic inflation, Trump’s tariffs have driven them up again.

But you wouldn’t know it by watching our president, who has barely uttered a word about this since the start of his second term, apparently lost in a gold-plated version of the White House bubble that traps so many presidents.

The brutal election results, with voters citing affordability as their top concern, bounced right off Trump’s bubble: “Our energy costs are way down. Our groceries are way down. Everything is way down,” Trump said falsely. “So I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” Trump added, truthfully.

While every president wrestles with the White House bubble, this one is different from anything we have seen before. While Americans were fuming over rising costs, Trump was tearing down part of the White House for a gold-plated “Bribery Ballroom” funded by giant corporations with tens of billions in federal contracts and major enforcement actions before the federal government. He was announcing his intention to award himself $230 million in tax dollars from the Department of Justice. And he was pardoning his criminal business partner in a presidential crypto scheme that has enriched him by billions.

The “let them eat cake” contrast has been jarring, even grotesque. First, Trump’s stubborn refusal to address the healthcare crisis by at least renewing health care subsidies for millions of Americans led to a government shutdown. The administration then actively chose to cut SNAP benefits, weaponizing hunger and leaving millions more to starve before the holidays. 

A Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago as all of this was happening proved that Trump’s gold-plated bubble has cut off any contact with reality.

This is more than an indictment of Trump personally, though. To make a gold-plated bubble of corruption this sound-proof, fortified with cash and gifts approaching $2 billion since Trump’s re-election, takes a village. 

Trump’s authoritarian corruption thrives on making clear that the path of least resistance is to bend the knee and pay off the protection racket. And he methodically, often illegally, brandishes his powers to make the alternate path all but untenable. Far too many are now choosing the easy path.

In Trump’s first term, his excesses were curbed by a constellation of senior administration officials with a glimmer of independence, top private sector voices, and our international allies who were willing to stand together to have tough conversations.

Now, virtually all of those figures are instead enabling Trump and helping build the gold-plated bubble around him — and it is endangering us all.

Trump’s first term cabinet meetings had already set new standards for subservience. But whereas Jeff Sessions rightly recused himself from the Russia investigation and Bill Barr rightly indicted corrupt Republican officials, nobody even raises the question of whether Attorney General Pam Bondi will act to ensure politically motivated prosecutions of Trump’s enemies proceed. 

And whereas first term Chief of Staff John Kelly — no friend of progressives on policy — viewed it as his responsibility to provide Trump with accurate information and filter out self-serving nonsense, Trump’s current Cabinet is doing the opposite. The TV host-turned-Medicare-and-Medicaid-Director Dr. Mehmet Oz stated that the result of Affordable Care Act premiums rising would be that “the average American who’s on the ACA is going to pay $13 more than this year. That’s not a big issue.” In reality, the average cost of monthly premium payments is projected to more than double, going up by 114%. 

When it comes to the private sector, what was a nearly united front to stand against political violence and the subversion of our democracy after Jan. 6 has turned into a race to the bottom to curry favor. Look no further than the funder list for the Trump gold-plated ballroom — a who’s who of major corporations with $279 billion in business before the federal government, despite many previously cutting off political donations in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. 

Nvidia, the trillion-dollar chip company whose official stance is to “not make [political] contributions of any kind,” boldly defended their contribution and the whole ballroom enterprise, and days later was thrilled to hear that Trump was planning to allow sale of their chips for AI to China — to the shock and alarm of senators in both parties who called the decision a national security catastrophe.

On that same trip to Southeast Asia, many of our allies put their obvious intelligence assessments of Trump to use, recognizing that in negotiations with Trump flattery and personal benefit can be bartered for much larger diplomatic gains. Perhaps the most blatant example was in South Korea, where Trump was presented with an oversized gold crown to celebrate Trump’s “golden age.”

Whether it’s subservient staffers, corporate donors, or international allies, the American people need the reinforcement of the gold-plated bubble to end — the consequences are too severe.

For President Trump, it is time to wake up and listen to the outrage of the American people. That can start with preventing skyrocketing health insurance premiums, ending the attacks on America’s energy supply that drive up utility rates, and stopping the attacks on proven programs like SNAP, Medicaid, disability benefits, and more that vulnerable American kids depend on.